May 13, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:46
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mollaney from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| So, conservative groups, a few liberals and the internet are justifiably up in arms because the IRS starting in 2011 and particularly focusing in February 2012 began to target Those groups who were claiming tax-exempt status, whose mission statements included things like taxed enough already or the Tea Party movement, included the word patriot, included attempting to educate people about the Constitution, and so on. | |
| And the IRS began sending shockingly intrusive questionnaires and demands upon these groups, which resulted in a number of these groups withdrawing their Applications for tax-exempt status. | |
| And then, of course, the IRS denied that this was happening in March of 2012 when it made its way to Congress and said, nothing of the sort is occurring, which, of course, as you know, in politics now means everything of the sort is occurring. | |
| And this, of course, is being blamed as usual, right? | |
| So there's the denial that it's ever happening. | |
| And then right before the report comes out, this was not in a formal press announcement, but rather as a result of a Q&A. IRS officials admitted that this was happening. | |
| firms is happening. | |
| And the fact that this happened right in the middle of a presidential election campaign cycle, the fact that it happened in states where there was a significant battleground for Democrats, particularly in Ohio, tells you everything that you need to know about where this directive is coming from. | |
| The IRS, of course, says, no, no, no, you see, it's these low-level employees, you know, the guy who picks the nose of the janitor, he just decided to go and target all of these conservative groups, something which happens to benefit the presidential campaign of one, Obama something something, I can't remember. | |
| Anyway, so the idea that this is some low-level IRS agent who's executing high-level presidential re-election strategies, what could you even say? | |
| I just can't imagine how anyone can take that even remotely seriously. | |
| Now, this of course is natural. | |
| It's predictable. | |
| It is, of course, an impeachable offense should it find its way up to the White House or anywhere close, in the same way that Richard Nixon was impeached in part for his use of the IRS to target political enemies. | |
| This had a chilling effect on the election cycles. | |
| If you're a nonprofit who's out there advocating and you're being sniffed around by the IRS attack dogs, naturally, you're going to curtail your activities. | |
| You're going to be extra cautious and you're going to be a little alarmed about sending all of this information about everyone in your organization and information about your donors to the IRS who then say, we have to make it public. | |
| This is going to be a chilling effect on future donors who may see their names out there and so on. | |
| So, of course, it's a massive invasion of privacy. | |
| It's a massive partisan use of the most awesome political power the government has, which is to tax, second really only to its capacity to prosecute. | |
| And everyone's missing the point completely. | |
| If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't even care about the answers. | |
| Sorry, I had to just nip and get a cold shower. | |
| The point is that the IRS and taxation as a whole is entirely focused on violating your conscience, on violating that which you want to do, and violating that which you consider to be right. | |
| So the fact that there was some targeting of conservative groups that might have had a chilling effect on political discussion in a 2012 election cycle, not insignificant, but entirely unimportant relative to the central function of taxation in a state of society. | |
| The central function of taxation in a state of society is to violate your conscience and to force you to do that which you would not otherwise want to do. | |
| That's the whole point. | |
| So focusing on these little non-profits is really missing the whole point. | |
| Let me give you an example. | |
| See if I can blow away some fog from the status cobwebs that infest so many people's craniums. | |
| Let's say, for instance, you are vehemently against the slaughterhouse 9 billion that's going on in Iraq at the moment, where between 1 and 1.5 million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion over the past 10 years. | |
| Let's say you find that a little distasteful in your moral conscience. | |
| And let's say that you want to actually act on your moral conscience. | |
| Oh... | |
| Sorry, you can't. | |
| Because you have to be forced at gunpoint to pay taxes for that which you consider, and rightly so, emotionally and morally vile, satanic, and abhorrent. | |
| Oh, wait, I've got another one. | |
| Maybe the whole military-industrial complex thing that goes on in Western countries. | |
| Let's focus on the U.S. The U.S. is the biggest betrayer of mankind in this, at least the U.S. government, biggest betrayer of mankind in this regard. | |
| Let's say you're not a huge fan of the government taking your money and using it to produce weapons which they then sell to a wide variety of extremely questionable people all throughout the world and then claim you see the world as a dangerous place so we've got to be here to protect you, which is kind of like your security guard arming the thieves that encircle your warehouse. | |
| But anyway, let's say you find the military-industrial complex and the arming of foreign groups pretty abhorrent. | |
| Ah, can you follow your own conscience on that? | |
| No, you can't! | |
| Why? | |
| Because if you don't pay the taxes which support the military industrial complex, guys who are blue will hold guns to your necks and drag you away to jail. | |
| What if you find the indoctrination that goes on in your average public school to be kind of not to your particular taste? | |
| Maybe you don't want sex education for your nine-year-old. | |
| Maybe you don't want to be told about how wonderful the government is to have that poured into your ear like Hamlet's uncle's poison every day into your child. | |
| Well, let's say that you find the quality of education to be abhorrent. | |
| You found statistically that children will learn much better when there are no teachers around, and you want to save your children from the boredom and over-medication that occurs in these health and lack of concentration camp facilities. | |
| Well, are you allowed to withdraw your consent in any practical means from the public school system? | |
| Why no? | |
| If you don't pay your property taxes, you see that the government requires in order to pay the teachers to work there four hours a day, well, then the aforementioned cats are blue, come to your house with guns, put it against your jugular, and take you away to the cozy little rape rooms run by the government. | |
| You really could go on and on with this indefinitely. | |
| Maybe you're not a big fan of the war on drugs. | |
| Maybe your beloved brother was caught with a doobie in his pocket, ended up in jail. | |
| Maybe you're not such a big fan of prosecuting people for putting harmless bits of vegetation up their own orifices. | |
| Well, that's too bad. | |
| Sorry if you don't fund the war on drugs. | |
| Jugular, gun, rape room, you get the picture. | |
| So the whole point of taxation is to force people to do what they would not otherwise do. | |
| How do you know that? | |
| You know that for a simple and obvious fact. | |
| Because there's a gun in the equation. | |
| You know the difference between lovemaking and rape is kind of the knife to the neck. | |
| Once there's a knife to the neck, it ain't lovemaking, it's rape. | |
| And one of the differences between, say, theft and charity is whether you know you're being stolen from. | |
| So, one of the differences between assault and boxing is the voluntary versus the involuntary nature of that, right? | |
| So, fight club ain't a matter of assault. | |
| So, the reality is, as soon as there's a gun in a human interaction, you know that it's win-lose. | |
| That one person is being forced to do something they don't want to do because there's a gun there. | |
| Because if you hand a kid a chocolate, you don't need to threaten them to eat it. | |
| I mean, for the most part, that's what they're going to want to do. | |
| So people have this, the government reflects the will of the people. | |
| No, that's exactly the entire opposite of the truth. | |
| You see, government is the agency that uses force, that initiates force against citizens. | |
| And whenever there's a gun involved, you know that it is not the will of the victim. | |
| So taxation represents everything. | |
| Everything that human beings desperately do not want to do, and they don't want to do it to the point where they have to be threatened with guns and rape rooms and prosecution and property theft and all kinds of monstrosities. | |
| In order to get them to do it. | |
| How do you know that people don't like the welfare state? | |
| Because there's a gun to people's heads in order to fund it. | |
| How do you know that people don't support war? | |
| Because the wars have to be funded through either the direct theft of taxation or the indirect thefts of inflation, the inflation of the money supply resulting in price inflation, or borrowing, which is simply theft from the future. | |
| So the idea that the government of the IRS represents the will of the people is the complete opposite of the truth. | |
| It's like saying the shadow is the statue. | |
| No, it's just the darkness cast by the statue. | |
| And the IRS, as the enforcement agency of the state, represents exactly what people don't want to do. | |
| People say, oh, I'd pay taxes to do this and that. | |
| No, you pay taxes because you're going to get thrown in jail if you don't. | |
| The United Way, they get their money honorably by asking you for it and you can say no, as does Apple and Microsoft and you name it, right? | |
| But the government is the sole agency in the world with the power to initiate the use of force and to mess your life up beyond recognition. | |
| Should you choose not to accede to their gun-toting demands? | |
| So, sorry about the reality, sorry to break the matrix for you if that has not already occurred, but this is a completely tiny example. | |
| If you focus on this, you really are missing the big picture. | |
| The government represents the desperate subjugation of the people at the point of a gun. | |
| It certainly does not represent the will, other than you could say, I guess, the will to stay out of jail, which is like saying that a rape victim is making love because she has a desire to To not die. | |
| This is Stefan Molyne from Freedom Aid Radio. |
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